Canada plans 'nuclear renaissance' with up to 10 reactors built by 2040
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
- one of the largest uranium reserves
- a well respected and safe nuclear design in CANDU
- experience with building and refurbishing nuclear reactors(Darlington)
and for Ontario itself A need for more baseload to work with the large amount of solar and wind that Ontario has added in the last 10 years.
Saskatchewan also now has a potential need for nuclear for industrial use now that wasn't present before from its existing population.
if the government can clear the red tape by using a well tested reactor design then they could certainly get some of these reactors built in that time frame.
15 seems...ambitions, but if we're going to spend at a federal level this is probably one of the better things to invest in.
If they can make them cookie cutter as much as possible and not unique snowflakes like has been the pattern at least in the US, they can probably do it both on the timeline and a somewhat reasonable cost basis
If they build 15 individual projects instead of managing this as a single big project, yeah that is very ambitious
Surely it would increase variance of outcomes, but the expectation is the same of each and overall?
Agree it would be mad though. Seems already a bit mad not to standardise internationally on a rough blueprint, or the modular thing in the news occasionally, and just churn out basically the same thing everywhere as needed.
What is exciting to me is that these just installed the first module of the BWRX 300 at Darlington. I was so afraid that BWRX was going to be another SMR that gets talked about for decades but it looks like they are really doing it. See https://www.autonocion.com/us/canada-tonne-grid-nuclear-reac... !
The great thing about boiling water reactors is that you just have to handle water. The radioactive portion of the systems is simple. Which is good, because it can't be maintained much during the entire lifespan of the plant.
When you look at the history of nuclear reactors, almost all the problems involve plumbing. The less that can go wrong with the plumbing, over 60 years or so, the better. For molten salt reactors, the physics is promising, the chemistry is a pain (fluorine, for starters), and the plumbing has major corrosion and clogging problems (high temperature radioactive molten salts and pipes just do not get along, even with really exotic alloys.)
It's not impossible. But it's going to be prone to expensive problems, some of which probably will not be anticipated. Remember Ft. St. Vrain, the helium gas cooled reactor. Great idea. Ran for ten years. Even used some thorium. Troubles in the radioactive portion of the gas plumbing system meant it had to be shut down and dismantled.[2] That was sad, because it actually worked well for years.
[1] https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1484689
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Saint_Vrain_Nuclear_Power...
Online reprocessing of nuclear fuel necessary for some thorium fuel cycle designs (reprocessing inside the nuclear power plant) could increase the risk of nuclear proliferation. U.S. government, as a general policy, doesn't like when non-weapon states do nuclear reprocessing.
These days I am more excited about Plutonium cycle reactors using chloride salts because they fix the problems of the FBR (occupational safety in fuel fabrication for one) and the fluoride salt reactors (having to dispose of used graphite cores). You do get some longer lived TRUs but you have so many excess neutrons you could burn some of the fission products. Most important the Pu cycle can be launched with the nuclear waste we already have, whereas the math doesn’t really work for launching LFTR.
Moltex got around this in their concept by only using chloride salts inside the fuel tubes; the surrounding sterile molten salt was a fluoride. Being sterile, the oxidation potential of the fluoride salt could be kept low enough to be compatible with stainless steel.
(Moltex ran out of money last year, I've read, and has been selling its IP as distressed assets.)
Chasing baseload is a fool's game. You will always have a mismatch between power needed and power produced. Power storage is necessary to move excess power produced to times of excess power need. e.g., shave the peaks to fill the valleys.
Any storage reduces the need for baseload and peaker plants. 4-6 hrs move daytime excess solar to fill evening needs. Overnight baseload excess can refill the batteries to cover the morning excess need before solar fully kicks in. Expanding battery capacity to 8-12 hours further reduces the need for expensive power sources such as nuclear and gas.
For example, in Denmark[1] a solar-dominated grid would cost around 565 EUR/MWh. A nuclear-dominated grid would cost around 141 EUR/MWh.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422... Fig. 3
That's not what it says. It says that would be the cost assuming the current grid and power came from only solar or only nuclear. The majority of the cost then is for overprovisioning and storage, especially to handle the lack of sun in the winter.
The actual low cost power comes from mixes of renewables, that they note nuclear can't compete with (especially in their hypothetical future energy system with things like scheduled EV charging). They give an example of offshore wind (66%), solar (8%), CCGT (26%) (primarily natural gas) for 66 EUR/MWh, or, restricting to biomass for the gas plant: offshore wind (84%), solar (13%), CCGT (3%) at 99 EUR/MWh.
(it's also worth noting that this is for Denmark. Something like 98% of Canadians live south of Denmark's southernmost line of latitude).
"The utmost amount (46%) of wood pellets comes from the Baltic countries (Latvia and Estonia) and 30% from the USA, Canada and Russia.6 Estonia and Latvia have steadily been the primary exporters of biomass to Denmark, mainly in the form of wood pellets and wood chips."
(So it depends how much CO2 the ships used to transport it there)
Commissioning reactors that won't come online for 10-15 years makes no sense at all, economically and practically.
Because we won't need base load in 15 years? Or because you're arguing that we'll have so many batteries, and they'll be so cheap, and they'll be so over-provisioned regarding summer/winter variance, that we won't be able to sell excess nuclear power to the states?
Personally, I wouldn't make either bet, no matter what odds you give me
...while also having a colder climate than the Danish. At least while the Gulf Stream is still working.
https://freeingenergy.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Graph-s...
Edit: this is exactly what your link is showing > Demonstrates that mixed wind–solar portfolios outperform single technologies.
...
> At the case level, we find that in countries such as Denmark with available wind and solar energy resources, nuclear power does not seem to be part of the least-cost solution, neither in today's energy systems nor in future systems of climate neutral societies. This conclusion is valid for the present cost of nuclear power in Europe as well as for IEA/WEO future expectations. The future overnight cost for nuclear power of 4500 EUR/MW in 2050 represents the so-called “nth-of-a-kind” cost for new reactor designs, with assumed substantial cost reductions from the first-of-a-kind projects, while this violates the historical experience of nuclear power technology.
That's why all modern (aka the last 40-50 years or so) nuclear reactors are capable of changing power output at 3-5% of nameplate capacity per minute: https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12...
This way you don't need to ridiculously overbuild solar and wind, and you have a better guarantee for power supply. Especially in colder climates: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48640358
> Overnight baseload excess can refill the batteries to cover the morning excess need before solar fully kicks in. Expanding battery capacity to 8-12 hours further
So, at best 20 hours of power supply from storage?
This is not a technical problem, but nuclear plants already struggle to compete on cost of energy when running 24/7.
Every minute such a plant runs at less than nominal output, those already bad economics grow worse.
But yes, it absolutely makes more sense to run those plants 24/7 at 100% capacity.
And we have base-load that matches this reliable generating capacity very well.
The 40%-60% base load absolutely should be provided by nuclear if you don't have hydro (and even if you have hydro, some nuclear still makes sense).
The remainder should almost certainly be a mix: some more reliable nuclear, some storage, some wind, some solar.
So either you restrict the amount of solar that can be produced or you subsidize the Nuclear prices. Both solutions are increasing prices for idiological reasons. If we do that might as well invest in solutions that are on exponential trajectories, like solar and battery.
The whole baseload argument when talking about renewables is a strawman. Both intermittent (like solar and wind) and constant output (like Nuclear) are baseload technologies, despite working very differently. Both require over provisioning, on demand sources or storage. It does not make any sense to bet on a solution that despite significant subsidise over almost 70 years has failed to produce any exponential count reduction, if the other solution is on an exponential curve right now.
For mis-designed electricity markets, see also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000–2001_California_electrici...
It can be fixed easily by giving priority to reliable producers and only allowing intermittent producers in once the reliable producers are used up.
> The whole baseload argument when talking about renewables is a strawman
No. It is actually essential, because intermittent renewables cannot reliably supply electricity, yet we need reliable electricity supply.
Intermittents are not baseload technology, because they cannot reliably supply electricity when needed.
Key word: running 24/7. Which neither solar nor wind can do.
> Every minute such a plant runs at less than nominal output, those already bad economics grow worse.
Is that why countries that boast "we have so much renewable energy now" tend to import electricity from stable sources (nuclear and hydro) the moment there's a long period of overcast skies with little to no wind?
Having a grid with no baseload generation and only storage is going to spell disaster during extended cold+calm periods. Rolling blackouts when it’s -30C outside…
Canada uses 1,500 GWh of electricity per day. 12 hours of storage is 750 GWh of storage. Estimated for grid storage costs range from $125 to $250 per kwh for fully installed and connected systems (not just the cost of the cells alone). At $200/KWh Canada would be looking at $150 billion for 12 hours of storage.
Storage can paper over the unreliability problems of the intermittent producers to some extent, but at relatively high cost for comparatively short amount of times.
Filling constant demand with intermittent producers + storage does not make sense.
In a sanely designed grid you overprovision non-reliable renewables like solar and wind to provide your peak daytime usage and nuclear (or hydro if you are lucky enough) takes up the rest during the night and when wind is not blowing. Batteries to further flatten the duck curve and provide grid firming as required.
Then you have fallback to nuclear and load shedding programs for rare seasonal issues solving that last 1-3% that is incredibly expensive with non-dispatchable power sources. No need to build natural gas plants that sit idle 95% of the time. You overbuild solar since it's basically free from a capex standpoint and use that to charge your batteries when the sun shines.
This lets you maximize capital investment over your entire generating fleet while still providing relatively cheap and - most importantly - reliable power for industrial usage.
Of course, the choice society has made to make nuclear exceedingly expensive might make it pencil out that it's cheaper to subsidize natural gas. But I think that's naive and foolish for the long run.
Nuclear waste would be the other large remaining issue, but again - society chose to create that problem and not solve it. It's not technical in nature.
Batteries have no reasonable path forward for seasonal storage in many locations in the world. Nuclear does. Solving overnight storage is simply not interesting, as it's the easy problem to solve.
tldr; Build it all. Nuclear, solar, wind, batteries, and hell - even natural gas as a last resort.
What you’re saying makes sense but only for a planned state economy where the government owns (or subsidizes) all generation. It’s not possible in a free market economy, the nukes would go bankrupt/ never be built
Some Canadian provinces have IPPs -- Independent Private-Power companies but they are often operating under the patronage of government. Many owe their existence to privatisation, lobbying and sweetheart contracts. (E.g. in British Columbia, private run-of-river hydro companies scandalously secured a 60 year guaranteed non-market rate on electricity. https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2016/09/12/BC-Hydro-Public-Intere... )
If “or controlled by” means privately owned plants that are subject to local regulations, then that is not particularly interesting or relevant to the discussion
They can’t cope with variable load, they can’t cope with other sources. They are only remotely viable with large amounts of storage.
Care to explain, I've never seen a genuine solution that goes beyond hand waving, bad faith arguing, and aggressiveness.
Waste can also be reprocessed into new fuel, further reducing it.
In the US, we have a suitable site that has been authorized and cancelled for 20 some years now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...
The reasons it keeps being cancelled, and the waste is stored on-site at nuclear plants instead, is purely political and nothing to do with the technological or safety aspects, according to the GAO.
But it's only used to store military nuclear waste, not civilian nuclear waste.
Similar problem if local communities fight new nuclear plants tooth and nail, dragging out the timelines/increasing costs. Having the "correct" argument based on objective facts doesn't really matter if people/elected officials who have veto or dilatory powers aren't buying it.
Reprocessing, isn't infinite. There's going to be waste to deal with.
You've not presented any technical solutions, instead you made it political by claiming that's the only problem.
Do you have an actual understanding of the problems or are you just pushing nuclear because it's aligning with you politically
Edit: it's clear from the down votes i am getting that this is political, not technical.
If you're down voting with no technical understanding you're political.
https://news.ontario.ca/en/release/1007558/ontario-delivers-...
France built 55 reactors in around 15 years during its first build-out and that wasn't an accident, we both know how to do this and Canada seems to be in a good place for that kind of performance.
Copper prices are through the roof, and the usual copper players are seemingly unwilling to expand much
(Atleast in India)
That does not explain why Ontario needs more nuclear power generation some nebulous time in the future to support those same wind/solar installations per the original comment and parent reference.
Ontario anticipates that electricity usage will climb in the future and is working to build more capacity to accommodate future demand. There will be need for increased nuclear capacity to service that. However, it remains uncertain what that has to do with a wind or solar install from 10 years ago?
Grid-forming inverters, particularly with batteries, can totally do this job.
- is very far North and can't really use solar at all for 3 month per year because in winter the nights are long, the weather is terrible and the sun is always low in the sky.
Once you have base load from nuclear why do you need solar and wind at all?
It corresponds with solar generation in the sense that more electricity is used during the day, when the sun is out.
Nuclear power has its advantages, and may be worth it short term because climate change is a threat to humanity, but nuclear is not a renewable resource. Solar/wind with proper recycling could in theory sustain itself into perpetuity. Humanity needs to find sustainable ways for powering itself in the long term.
VRE do still create hazards, but at different supply chain steps - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj6nly288j4o
Decentralization is not a feature but a bug- it needs massive grid investments which drives up prices in a era where you want prices to be low for electrification. France has the best of both - decentralized grid but centralized groups of power. This way grid costs less
Nuclear can be recycled. It's not done because it's cheaper not to.
And ren alone are not sufficient. Countries that have both nuclear and ren are in best position. This can be seen today in case of Germany vs France/Sweden https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/live/fifteen_min...
A very expensive to build with lower utilization rates than PWRs despite online refueling. A solution AECL has been trying to move away from for the last thirty years.
And that online refueling? Looks a lot like a weapons grade Pu pipeline.
Nuclear power is the highest cost source of electricity in LCOE terms [1]. We just need to look at Hinkly Point C ("HPC") in the UK. HPC was proposed in 2010, approved in 2016, began construction in 2018 and is scheduled to completion currently somewhere between 2029 and 2031 for the first reactor with the second following 1-3 years after (IIRC). From an initial cost estimate of 15 billion pounds in 2015, it's ballooned to 31-35 billion and may well exceed 50 billion [2][3].
The contracted price per MWh is linked to inflation and currently pushing 140 pounds, about 50% more expensive than offshore wind that could be built in a fraction of the time.
So there is a 35 year contract period for power but HPC has a lifespan of 60 years. What happens after? Market rates. Many will argue it'll get cheaper as the plant is paid off. If that's the case, why hasn't electricity from nuclear sources gotten cheaper as the existing plants have aged?
The answer is the same with any nuclear criticism: "this time it'll be different". Fukushima? "This time it will be different." Chernobyl? "This time it will be different." Spiralling costs? "This time it will be different." Massively delayed completion dates? "This time it will be different."
And we haven't even touched the negative externalities yet. That is, the uranium fuel cycle. Processing uranium ore produces waste. Using fuel rods produces waste. We don't really have a good solution for dealing with that waste. There's a lot of hand-waving about "just store it underground and centuries from now we'll hope they've figured it out". Storage, particularly for the first decade or more is not as easy as the hand-waving makes it out to be. It requires cooling ponds because the waste still produces significant heat. So you need infrastructure from that. UF6/UF4 from procesing aren't a solved problem either.
I will never understand why so many otherwise smart people keep trying to make nuclear happen in their minds.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity
[2]: https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/edf-announces-hi...
[3]: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/02/20/hinkley-poin...
I don't really get this either. I've come to think that it comes down to two pieces. The easy piece is that some people don't seem to realize just how good renewable power sources have gotten in the last 10-20 years. Nuclear has simply been outcompeted in so many ways. But this happened pretty quickly, so not everyone has gotten the message.
The other one is more subtle. For decades there were a lot of bad attacks on nuclear as a technology. (And a few good criticisms, but for some reason those never seem to get the attention, even though they should -- they're pretty strong arguments!) There's a certain type of person who loves to debunk these bad arguments, and there's plenty of that type of person around here. And that can get you emotionally invested into the thing you've been defending (perhaps rightfully: they were crappy arguments against it), and might keep you promoting it after its natural time has passed.
(To be clear: I don't think nuclear plants are worthless, and I think keeping the ones we've got operating smoothly as base load stations is probably an excellent idea. But I don't think it makes a whole lot of sense to be building more of them these days.)
> Canada needs new power now. Not 15-20 years from now,
Building nuclear doesn't stop you from building whatever else you want. Though I assume that Canada being Canada, it'll take 15 years just to complete the requisite negotiations with every indigenous tribe and to arrive at a settlement with whatever environmental and assorted NIMBY groups are already warming up their lawsuit-filing laptops right now.
Also, you're predictably citing a couple of bad nuclear accidents, over like 70 years of nuclear generation. Both are actually pretty well understood. If we applied that risk management logic to forms of transport, you wouldn't even be allowed to walk anywhere.
The graph actually suggests something different - you can see how coal (a mature and well -understood technology) has basically flat-lining costs that increase very slowly over time as we mine out the easy fuel. That is pretty much what we'd expect for a mature technology.
Gas, Solar and Wind have rapidly decreasing cost curves following some sort of asymptotic pattern which is what we'd expect for new and exciting technologies.
Nuclear has the most bizzare cost curve of any new technology where every year it costs more than the year before; a pattern which makes effectively no sense and is really only explainable by the heavy and effective political attack that nuclear has been under in the US and EU. On a technical basis it is probably going to be cheaper than coal and if allowed to innovate likely much cheaper than solar and wind (the too-cheap-to-meter line is plausible, we've seen that sort of market in networking).
> The answer is the same with any nuclear criticism: "this time it'll be different". Fukushima? "This time it will be different." Chernobyl? "This time it will be different." Spiralling costs? "This time it will be different." Massively delayed completion dates? "This time it will be different."
That sounds like an extremely reasonable answer? It was different after Chernobyl and Fukushima. We've never seen a plant melt down that was designed & built around the 1970s. And again, project budgeting is mostly about politics not the technology involved. If costs are consistently X the technical estimate, planners will add in a factor of X unless there is a political reason not to.
> We don't really have a good solution for dealing with that waste.
Seems to be a solved problem? We've been doing this for 50 years now and despite their best efforts the anti-nuclear crowd haven't managed to come up with a concrete example of what the problem is that isn't easily ignored. Society produces a lot of toxic waste already and it really isn't that big of an issue. I did the calcs once a long time ago for a HN post and we're often talking about a few shipping containers worth of material in these conversations; ie nothing.
We haven't figured out how to deal with the toxic byproducts of solar panels either and that is largely a non-issue. Plan A is to dump the waste somewhere and Plan B is to go with a better option if one turns up. Problem solved.
Independence from China and the US. Once you have your reactor engineering set and can churn them like China almost everything can be sourced either locally or you have multiple providers. Solar and wind? China. Batteries? China.
When you get in a spat with China you suddenly have to setup those industries from 0 at home. And that won't be just 15 years to ramp-up.
So the best is to start building nuclear reactors, silicon fabs, rare earth processing etc. now instead of having the exact same argument we had 20 years ago in 2045.
France has lower prices vs Germany and now, during peak summer heatwaves you can see who does best https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/live/fifteen_min... . Germany spent on EEG alone so far double the cost of entire french fleet. Results are clear
HPC is not a rule but exception. And it'll work for more than 60 for sure. Existing nuclear is in fact cheap https://www.kkg.ch/de/uns/geschaefts-nachhaltigkeitsberichte... or check Lazard data for it
Is bunk. You should be using LFSCOE instead.
https://davidturver.substack.com/p/lcoe-levelised-cost-of-en...
Those can both be true. Canada will likely need more power in 15 years too. It's called long term planning.
That's utterly incorrect. For a country like Canada (or Germany), the priciest form of energy is solar. Wind is close second.
And no, I'm not hallucinating. The key here is _guaranteed_ power during wintertime. There are no generally feasible renewable solutions for that.
Something that will need people working on building for 15 years sounds about right for what government is doing now.
So why didn't this happen anywhere - except perhaps two of the sunniest and windiest places in the world, Australia and California, where energy demand (AC) also matches production? Where are the seasonal battery storage facilities that places like Europe or I guess most of NA would need?
My only conclusion is that renewables are also far more expensive than the sticker price, due to the needed grid investment, batteries and frankly unsolved problems of seasonal storage.
I don't mind being wrong, but status quo seems to be, let's not build nuclear because it's too expensive, we're sort of building renewables, but CO2 emmissions, never mind levels, keep on increasing.
It doesn't seem to add up to a coherent story.
Canada won't need new power 15 years from now? Did a time traveler tell you about a coming Dark Age?
An independent Alberta will likely join the US, and of course building a domestic-only pipeline is easier than doing so across national borders.
That's not serious. Construction start is too far away.
Of all Western developed countries, Canada is pretty much the last hope for a country with the skills to build nuclear at something that's within spitting distance of being economical.
The US and France have shat the bed royally over the past two decades, they're out of the game of construction competence. The UK stopped doing their own and outsourced to overpriced and unreasonable French reactors, that are only going forward with what be massive amounts of corruption in order to justify such expensive energy when there's cheaper batteries + offshore wind. Finland had France build them a reactor, and wisely negotiated a fixed price up front, and the construction overruns bankrupted the French company which is now really French in the sense that it bankrupted itself on Olkiluoto and had to be nationalized in the name of national security.
That leaves Canada, with their famous CANDU reactors and can-do attitudes. But 9 years of planning before construction? Perhaps that's what's actually needed, and they'll have a chance of actually constructing it in five years, but.... super super doubtful.
Canada, do not fall into the same trap as the rest of the nuclear frauds in the Western world. Five years for construction? Don't kid yourselves, even China breaks ridiculous timelines like that, and as good as you are, Canada, you're no China when it comes to massive massive construction projects. Just look at how hard it is to build in Vancouver, for example...
The Hualong One is a successor of the Westinghouse AP1000. The US has two of those operational, at Vogtle. Then Westinghouse Nuclear went bankrupt. China has four operational. All later units in China are Hualong One units or later designs.
These are all classic pressurized water reactors, all about 1 gigawatt. Nothing exotic here. The technology is known and works well.
That tender process will take a few years on its own, and can only conclude once locations have been vetted, and passed environmental + native approval. Even once approved, at any moment the entire process could be derailed, even if billions have been spent.
There is a lot to be said in terms of dealing with native groups correctly. Yet we've been seeing groups, "historical" native nations which have never been recognized before, or even really heard of before, simply appearing and stalling development of, well, anything.
Recently:
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/jamie-sarkonak-yet-another-...
To see a project stall which has billions of investment, was planned for 20 years, and still have roadblocks due to 58 people is ... disheartening. Yet in most cases such native groups are simply paid off. EG, kickbacks.
In terms of environmental assessments, of personal note, I was trying to buy some land from a farmer. This farmer spent 2+ years going through all the required steps to sell a few pieces of his land, this was to be for his retirement.
He successfully conducted all the surveys, applied for and had zoning work done, land separated into a few parcels, while still keeping most of his farm. He just wanted to sell a small portion of land, so he and his wife could retire comfortably. This process took 2+ years.
He and I had negotiated a fair price, and were working on the purchase, and then the environmental assessment came to play. This took an additional 6 months, and found one, I repeat one bird that was seen in the branches of a tree of "special concern". For clarity:
Extinct (X) A wildlife species that no longer exists. Extirpated (XT) A wildlife species no longer existing in the wild in Canada, but occurring elsewhere.
Endangered (E) A wildlife species facing imminent extirpation or extinction.
Threatened (T) A wildlife species likely to become endangered if limiting factors are not reversed.
Special Concern (SC) (Note: Formerly described as “Vulnerable” from 1990 to 1999, or “Rare” prior to 1990.) A wildlife species that may become a threatened or an endangered species because of a combination of biological characteristics and identified threats.
Not at Risk (NAR) (Note: Formerly described as “Not In Any Category”, or “No Designation Required.”) A wildlife species that has been evaluated and found to be not at risk of extinction given the current circumstances.
--
Note the language. Special concern is May become threatened. Not threatened, just "May become".
This bird was not nesting on site. No other members of the species were seen on the land. The bird was simply seen on a tree branch.
Entire sale?
Terminated. Land can not be sold without multiple follow-up assessments.
I could understand if the species was threatened and nesting. Or at least even just threatened.
Even so, this region of Canada has trillions of acres of untamed land, and millions upon millions of acres of farmland surrounding this area. Further, building a house on a multi-acre lot, does not mean "all the trees and land will be destroyed".
I guess my point is, there is sensible custodianship of the land and relationships with first nations, and there is bad-shit crazy, bend over backwards, destroy everything around you custodianship.
As you can likely tell, I think there's too much red tape.
And that red tape is why it takes a decade to even hope to start. And there's no way, unless things change dramatically, that a decade will be enough. We'll have fusion power before a shovel hits dirt.
Because my friend had the craziest protectionism story.
He wanted to build a multi family home on his existing lot.
Of course all kinds of studies need to be done. One of them is a tree study. Which costs $3,000 alone per tree. He hired firm and they were doing a study (for building purposes).
Then one day a crew shows up and cuts the tree all of a sudden. Turns out that his neighbour, unknown to him, was complaining that the tree was creating too much shade. So without any study they just came and cut it down.
That’s before even his study results came back.
0 - https://www.neimagazine.com/news/darlington-smr-secures-fina...
It is not just a small boiling water reactor. It is a 300 MW-electric boiling water reactor, and if successful, it will be followed by 3 more of the same type for a total of 1.2 GW-electric. That is more than an AP-1000 reactor, and much less risky.
Genuine question: Why? Why not many smaller reactors? Small modular reactors seem pretty neat.
Is there an efficiency loss/total cost difference with smaller reactors?
Meanwhile Sweden is putting its money where its mouth is:
https://www.rolls-royce.com/media/press-releases/2026/15-06-...
There are two South Korean plants (Kori, Hangul) larger than Bruce
Kori[1] has 7 operational units today and 1 commissioning and 1 under construction
Hansul[2] has 8 operational units and another 2 more under construction.
All 4 new units are APR-1400 reactors ~1400 MW capacity. Kori should retains its top position, Saeul-3 in Kori Phase II has already reached criticality in April.
Tianwan in China will come close but its 7/8 units are slightly behind in construction than Saeul-3/4 in South Korea, plus the plant is also bit smaller at 6600MW now . The Russian VVER-1200 design China are using is also slightly smaller than Korean APR-1400.
As in the UK we were previously asking a French-Chinese partnership to build here so not sure why Canada didn’t get chosen for that.
Its crazy how fast britain has fallen off nuclear, the original british nuclear rollout should have stood the UK up as a permanent nuclear energy powerhouse but France took it from them.
It was a crash weapons program disguised as a civilian energy program, that very nearly went badly wrong at Windscale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire ; so much so that the site had to be renamed to Sellafield.
The rollout was hampered by the choice of two ultimately dead end technologies, Magnox and AGR. Then it ran into the industrial unrest and general lack of money of the 1970s, during which the government cancelled its space program (Black Arrow), and very nearly cancelled Concorde. The "white heat of technology" had worn off. Thatcher attempted to restart it, resulting in Sizewell B, but of course after 26 April 1986 any new nuclear was completely unthinkable and that was the end until Hinkley C. Which is still not finished.
The underlying tech though is yet to be proven, so some risk won’t deliver on time/to budget/at all.
The assembly and economies of scale for “mass production” have not been proven in practice; who will you sell the countless expensive ones before it gets cheaper?
And the smaller reactor has diseconomies of scale working against it for the electricity it produces. So the $/MWh price is much higher than for larger reactors.
If it is anything like all my french cookware, it will be done wonderfully.
[0] https://www.atkinsrealis.com/en/markets-and-services/markets...
So, yeah, it makes sense that they love nuclear now -- blank cheque to drag on for multidecades over budget. Likely the right people donated the right funds to the PC party and/or attended/funded Ford Fest
The first thing this government did when it got into power was pay out hundreds of millions in penalties for cancelling large wind projects, and for breaching its contract and exiting the cap and trade agreement with California and Quebec.
Ford loves to waste money and then wag his finger about how everyone else is fiscally irresponsible.
https://canada.constructconnect.com/dcn/news/projects/2026/0...
Hopefully that expertise is well placed to execute on these other projects.
I can't help but think its a sign that those concerns were easy to hold when energy was cheap and you could actually trust your neighbors. If that's the case, again huge speculation, it sure makes the concerns feel a bit hollow now.
I'd argue that this subgroup already achieved *tons* of goals over the last half century, and are nowadays playing second fiddle to the subgroup that is first and foremost concerned about climate change: Because those goals are far from met and much more urgent.
Those subgroups tend to have a very different outlook on nuclear energy: Nonsustainable superfund sites in the making for the first group, and highly useful emission stopgap for the second...
"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,"
Reduction in burning carbon and producing greenhouses is the number one concern of environmentalists and is a major driver of the increased acceptability of nuclear power production, especially if safety concerns are met. Also from the article:
> Unlike most other nuclear reactors, Candu reactors don't require enriched uranium. Ottawa says Western allies are turning away from Russia, one of the world's key suppliers of enriched uranium.
The problem of course is that safety has costs and people cut corners, leading to events like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima.
Is it?
Nothing is more environmentally friendly than hydroelectric dams. In Canada, there are endless rivers to dam, while also leaving endless rivers undammed. Further, damming a river doesn't destroy nature, it does however turn a river into a lake. Over the years it takes to build and complete the project, including the initial flooding, some species leave, new species take their place, and a healthy ecosystem remains.
Yet dams are attacked with a ferocity in this country, as if somehow having a dam is worse than a coal power plant. And while nuclear is great, we're therefore left with nuclear power, and all the outcome if that goes wrong, because using 0.0000001% of our rivers to build a few more dams, is "bad" for the environment.
Canada is massive.
I'm sure someone will want to reply with how horrible dams are, the concrete and carbon cost of concrete. Yet what's really the problem is that some want nothing ever built. Not a single method of new power generation, ever.
And so? This is what we end up with. Nuclear it is.
You do realise that rivers are constantly shifting, disappearing, lakes forming and disappearing, that none of this is static, yes?
I'm not even touching on the human concerns regarding population displacement.
Yes.
[non sequitur discussion of dams snipped]
Right, and that's my point. The ability to make clean energy with nuclear is not a new idea, that was the argument for nuclear all along.
> The ability to make clean energy with nuclear is not a new idea, that was the argument for nuclear all along.
It was one argument at some point but hardly "the" argument "all along", nor the major argument, nor the primary motivating argument. The initial arguments were about "atoms for peace", electricity "too cheap to meter", and independence from foreign oil. Global warming wasn't even an issue until James Hanson's Congressional testimony in 1988.
I won't respond further.
I think it's better to just outsource it to Koreans at least that way you can stay on budget and on time.
2005 ish - UK government release energy strategy and declares fission power plant intent.
2010 ish - UK government formally announces Hinkley Point site. It's declared the first reactor will come online 2019.
2019 - it does not.
2026 - best estimate is now 'around 2030'.
Historical cost estimates are an utter quagmire - but roughly estimated at £18 billion a decade ago, back when it was estimated to be online last year.
Current estimates - bring your own hubris - are roughly £46 billion.
This story has been beaten to death, I know - but recall, this is a country with some history of building and operating nuclear fission power plants, with convenient (2h by rail) access to a lot of expertise from France, and it's a joint-venture with China General Nuclear Power Group so presumably plenty of expertise to draw upon there.
Since 1999?
Your second link suggests a refurbishment of ONE power station.
Eglington Crossing light rail - 6 year delay (to 15 year total) with a tripling in cost to $15B - so about $1b per kilometre of light rail.
Peace River hydroelectric - costing double ($16B) original budget.
Vancouver wastewater - a 4x budget creep (to $4B) and a 10y delay so far - it hasn't opened yet.
My point is that it's not only nuclear fission power plants that are grossly underestimated in terms of cost and complexity, but rather, all large infrastructure projects.
Just happens that on top of all that, the estimated numbers for LCoE, payback, clean-up, opex, etc for nuclear fission are also misrepresented (or misunderstood, depending how cynical you are).
Even if Canada winds up relying more on CANDU reactors than SMR's, there is a case to be made for enriching domestically. There are a lot of potential customers looking for a reliable, ethical supplier. Canada has the raw minerals, political stability, and a long record of refusing to weaponize despite having the capability.
Jokes aside, Canada is well positioned to lead a nuclear renaissance, now that they have easy access to raw materials, easy access to cooling facilities and they can export surplus to energy hungry neighbor, it also makes it a good candidate for hosting lots of datacenters
Honest question; here in the USA we have not.
I hope Jimmy Carter's ghost will be just as willing to help us out the next time a reactor goes into meltdown as his physical self was the first time that happened. RIP Jimmy Carter.
We should have more nuclear, but they should be run for profit to hold them to account instead of massively indebting them to create public sector crony slush funds the way the current hydroelectric system has been run into the ground.
A micro reactor can practically fund itself on model training, data processing, and cryptocurrencies, and where it can't there is actual usage.
Nuke shouldn't replace Solar, it shouldn't be a competition. Nuke should push coal and gas out.
Solar isn't just about having big empty spaces either, it needs to be located near where people who service it actually want to live. AEMO used to have a policy of not revealing where upcoming solar projects were to be located, leading to multiple competing solar farms, only the first of which would be connected to the grid, the remaining projects being left sitting there doing nothing until transmission upgrades could be completed.
Not to mention, we dont have anything like the battery capacity needed to hold daytime voltage overnight. The Elon Musk battery in SA being famous for supplying a few minutes to hold over a voltage drop from a QLD coal plant failure, while gas came online to support it.
Nuclear isnt as bad as they say for cost either. Every report funded in Australia factors in the sovereign risk that the government might start or permit a project and kill it due to politics.
Theres no practical reason why we couldn't mirror the British rollout, bringing a reactor on every 3-5 years or whatever it was, except that most of those blokes are retired and we would like the british did, build the nuclear industry here from scratch.
Speaking of which, do you happen to know how many TBq (or what) other methods are putting into the atmosphere and hydrosphere?
Some black swan event could kill solar. Maybe some mega volcano explodes. It would suck to be 50+% dependent on it in that case.
We should have wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal, hydro, tidal, and even fossil fuels. We should have a total capacity in greater abundance than what we have today so that we can grow.
PV solar + batteries is a dead simple, solid state design that's easily scalable without huge up front capital requirements. We're not at the point yet where nuclear doesn't pencil out anywhere, but with current trends it's getting closer by the year.
I wish we built more nuclear 20-30 years ago when the competition was coal and gas but unfortunately we didn't and now the equation has changed. Shutting down existing reactors that are still viable is a bad move to be clear, but new plants are becoming increasingly hard to justify economically.
That's a very ambitious statement, every piece of hardware has lifecycle limitations. Engineering things for "infinite" lifetime significantly drives up the cost of the resulting product in most cases.
I would certainly hope the radiation-exposed parts of nuclear power plants are engineered for a very long life, but… there's water and metal involved, these things do need maintenance. And the non-irradiated parts probably need to be maintained much more frequently, e.g. the turbines certainly won't live forever.
As a matter of fact, solid state devices tend to last much longer, and PV is one of very few completely solid state power generation technologies. (It does, unfortunately, suffer from general sun exposure damage.) Personally speaking, without some digging I wouldn't make any claims which of them lives longer, it feels like it could go either way by quite a bit of margin.
I would love it if somebody who has recently built something like a fission plant could give us a report as to exactly what happened that caused this.
I'm not opposed to nuclear in the mix though. It's pretty incredible. And the South Koreans have done a pretty awesome job in the UAE with their reactors it sounds like.
If you're comparing nuclear reactors with solar panels though (which is tricky), depends which metric you go for. If total annual output? Then up it by almost an order of magnitude. 100km2+ would be needed to produce the same annual output as a 1GW at 90% nuclear station.
But we've a ton of land, so it makes a lot of sense.
To hit 100 sq km at 50% panel efficiency would mean averaging 20 watts per sq meter (obviously wrong). Even assuming a paltry 10% panel efficiency would only get you to 100 watts per sq meter.
There is - arguably a case for nuclear power in cold miserable places like Canada or Northern Europe because solar - by far the cheapest form of renewable energy, and still with a substantial runway to get cheaper - produces the least amount of energy precisely when those places need it most.
Australia, being a warm, sunny place, has far less seasonal variation in solar production, and at worst bas a grid that needs roughly the same amount of energy in winter and summer peaks.
Even in a net zero scenario things like running a gas turbine on biomethane or synthesised hydrogen for that last few percent of demand will make more economic sense than building nuclear in Australia.
If someone figures how to churn out SMRs for $3.95 each, sure, that would change matters, but that remains a hypothetical possibility that Australia does not have to plan around.
Peak electricity demand occurs when solar generation has dropped to nearly zero. It's not the last few percent, it's the last 90 something percent demand. This is the entire problem with solar (and wind, though slightly different patterns).
If you're going to "they should just" it, you really need to know at least that. It's just a hard problem even in Australia. The reason these "dirt cheap renewables" have not been pushing electricity prices down to historic lows anywhere in the world is that you've kind of been had by the marketing.
Solar and wind are very important and very cheap where applicable, and with more storage, better grids, and consumers that are better adapted to them they should gradually improve. But they are not going to "just" anything.
Remember how wind and solar was so cheap that it had already killed coal? That was a common mantra I heard maybe 20 years ago. Since then solar panels and wind turbines have become even cheaper and better so surely they must be moving on to just about killing off natural gas too... But no, it turns out 60% of Australia's electricity is generated by fossil fuels today, 40% being coal which is twice the amount that solar generated. How could that be possible decades after coal had been killed by solar? Really was some pretty wild propaganda.
This is not due to government corruption and incompetence and a cabal of coal barons preventing renewables. Nuclear maybe, but solar no. There is electricity generation surplus when solar is working in Australia, they turn off wind turbines and solar panels and try to give the electricity away for free. Cost of solar panels being zero would make approximately no difference to those 20% solar and 60% fossil fuels numbers.
And as much as a cyclist I dislike cars, the nice thing about electric cars is the potential that most often they can be charged at a time when it is convenient for the network. Mind you, cars just sit around 95% of the time.
So it's no longer "just solar" with a biogas turbine for the remaining few % demand, is it? It's solar with batteries to cover 3x the current daily solar output plus perhaps more to deal with multi-day fluctuations.
> That's a new trend and easy to miss
It's not new and not easy to miss, it's obvious they need storage to cover any more demand. This has literally been the biggest issue for solar for at least 20 years.
> but it will push out coal and gas.
Maybe. How much more credible are these claims than the "solar killed coal" idiocy from years ago? I mean solar and battery tech does continue to get better so you can mindlessly point to that and yes if it kept continuing surely it would push out fossil fuels (everywhere including airplanes and ships). But if we are talking actual timeframes and realistic technology projections?
https://reneweconomy.com.au/big-batteries-took-a-bite-out-of...
And average prices in the Australian national electricity market are going down as a result:
https://www.aemo.com.au/newsroom/media-release/renewables-li...
SA has highest household prices in Australia (or close to the top at least)
> https://reneweconomy.com.au/big-batteries-took-a-bite-out-of...
You realize that doesn't address the sum of what I wrote though? That is batteries taking over from gas peaking. Fossil fuels sit somewhere north of 75% of national generation when the sun is down.
> And average prices in the Australian national electricity market are going down as a result:
And electricity peaking is well suited to batteries because it is very high prices and not a long period. It's great if they can be used here to reduce prices, possibly they could be used independently of solar (though solar does make them a lot cheaper to charge).
But you presumably do understand how that is not removing fossil fuels from generation with just "solar and biogas turbines for a few % of peak", or no?
Just ONE square mile of batteries and a TOTAL of 100 x 100 square miles of Solar can power the entire USA 24/7. Area required will be much lesser for Canada.
See : https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/energy/articles/elon-musk-...
Why up Musk? Is he your primary source of news and ideas?
just join the US already
Relying on Trump or any other clown, makes no more sense.
Wind and solar could be deployed for a fraction of the proposed $100 billion investment and should be considered as part of the interim solution, while nuclear remains a long-term strategic project.
Rather than pursuing such an ambitious build out, a more practical approach might be to scale back the plan and focus on constructing one reactor each in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba as an initial phase.
Canada has also regularly refurbished their CANDU reactors, which are large multi year projects. And they do it on-time and under budget
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/renewed-bruce-3-...
The Bruce A refurbishment in the late 1990s and early 2000s saw five-fold cost overruns. Bruce A was originally projected to cost $0.9 billion but ended up at $1.8 billion. The Bruce B project was budgeted at $3.9 billion and ultimately cost $6 billion.
https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/ontarios-costly-...
Safety and operational issues also plagued the industry. The four units at Pickering had been shut down because of safety concerns—and then shut down again. By 1993, the performance of the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station, located on the shores of Lake Huron, had drastically declined. In 1997, Ontario Hydro announced that it would temporarily shut down its oldest seven reactors. By that time, the escalating costs of the newest reactors at the Darlington site were already a cautionary tale. Originally billed in 1978 at $3.9 billion the final cost in 1993 had more than tripled to $14.4 billion (1993 dollars).
Until the far right O&G lobbyist provincial government kneecapped the sector.
But not nearly as much as Vegas (3800) or LA (3250) or SF (2950).
That's what makes Calgary ideal for solar.
We need responsible growth. We need to acknowledge that there is no magic bullet for power generation, just managed risks. We need to acknowledge that those risks exist for all power sources, to varying degrees, and take different forms (whether it is the environmental impact or reliability of the power grid).
I'm all down with spamming nuclear plants but will that, in the end, give free electricity to the consumer? Lower the rates? ..or just continue to be an economic weapon against the masses?
- main problem with CANDU: proliferation. India was able to build nuclear weapons after using a Canadian built heavy water reactor (basically a CANDU reactor) [1]. There is no guarantee that another country will not try something similar in the future, the design has no built in proliferation resistance. An operator can remove irradiated fuel at any time, and if the IAEA discovers they engage in plutonium manufacturing and they get on a black list, they can manufacture their own fuel quite easily, because CANDU uses non-enriched uranium. With light water reactors, you need enriched fuel, so if you are flagged as a proliferator no fuel manufacturer will be allowed to sell you fuel, and it's going to be much harder for you to manufacture your own fuel, since you can't enrich. If you can enrich uranium, you might as well try to build a uranium bomb (like Iran is trying to do). Also, with light water reactors, you refuel only at discrete times, generally about 18 months apart, so it is much more difficult to extract lightly irradiated fuel without being caught by the IAEA.
Now some less important problems:
- because CANDU uses non-enriched uranium, it produces much more nuclear waste per GWh compared to light water reactors. Nuclear waste is not the boogeyman nuclear anti-advocates make it to be, but still, if you generate 5-10 times more nuclear waste than the mainstream alternatives, it is less than ideal.
- there is one positive reactivity feedback loop in a CANDU design. Because of that CANDU designs are not licenseable in the US. The Canadian nuclear regulator is comfortable that the design is stable [2], but if you can choose between a design with one positive feedback loop and one without any positive feedback loop, why would you choose the first?
- heavy water is a worse moderator than light water (by a large factor). It [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India_and_weapons_of_mass_dest...
[2] https://www.cnsc-ccsn.gc.ca/eng/resources/research/safety-an...
Related to US, it'll happen sooner or later https://www.nucnet.org/news/atkinsrealis-to-begin-licensing-...
I would not be so cavalier about that.
> It was not a Candu reactor what India have used
It was a heavy water reactor, called CIRUS [1], based on the NRX reactor that later evolved into the CANDU reactor [2].
> But there are easier and cheaper pathways - uranium enrichment distributed to be stealthy
Iran tried that. It is not easy to keep centrifuges stealthy, you need tens of thousands of them, and they need to be organized in cascades, you can't have one here, one there. You need a few hundred here, a few hundred there, and you need conversion and deconversion facilities (of uranium oxide into/from uranium hexafluride). It is virtually impossible to keep such a program secret, the more distributed it is, the more people need to be involved, how do you keep a program secret if there are thousands of people working in those numerous facilities?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIRUS_reactor
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor#Early_efforts
It's easier to keep them stealthy vs getting it from a reactor that operates under special conditions where Russia definitely helped, especially under current IAEA rulling
Though that only moves the needles from impossible to laughable.
> 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
There are plenty of credible plans, they all involve wind and solar. But as anyone watching clean energy news will know, Alberta is trying its hardest to get rid of all wind and solar development from the province.
As for the baseload argument, they already get >60% of the electricity from hydro and nuclear. How much more baseload do you really need? 100%?
So it's natural gas, nuclear, or renewables. And the Conservative gov't here has a bit of a bias against the latter. It's been growing the natural gas sector, undoing a lot of the hard work the previous Liberal gov't had put in on the wind side. Likely nuclear lobbyists now have their ear.
This as well as the failed pipeline projects have made Canadian infrastructure projects very high risk from a lending perspective, becuase there's now a non-insignificant risk that a province can welch out of financing a deal purely for short term political gain.
This announcement is a good announcement, but it's just bluster if the entire ecosystem around liability and policy stability isn't managed.
[0] - https://thenarwhal.ca/alberta-renewable-energy-investment-co...
The high-profile project cancellations people point to weren't a government ban. They happened because the province changed its transmission rules. Previously, ratepayers subsidized the massive utility costs required to connect remote wind and solar farms to the central grid. The province ended this, forcing private developers to internalize their own grid connection costs. Once forced to pay for their own infrastructure, highly speculative, unfinanced projects simply became economically unviable and dropped out of the queue.
If a private wind or solar developer wanted to build a massive farm in a remote, rural area (like Southern Alberta) where land is cheap but high-voltage power lines do not exist, they only had to pay for the immediate wire connecting their project to the nearest local substation. Taxpayers were subsidizing those players, because it was a "load pays" system.
Please do not fall pray to the general trope that Alberta is a backwards hillbilly province. Subsidizing private developments with public money is not something that should be encouraged.
On Canada broadly, you are correct in your baseload numbers and I agree with you.
(Energy trader here)
> Subsidizing private developments with public money is not something that should be encouraged.
Then perhaps they should start collecting money for their orphan well problem rather than letting it worse with the clear goal of making the rest of the country pay for it.
> Subsidizing private developments with public money is not something that should be encouraged.
What other kind of subsidy is there?